Searchers find crashed plane near Marineland

Rescue crews searching for survivors after a small plane crashed in a remote area near Marineland late Thursday night have located the crash site, authorities confirmed shortly after noon Friday.

A dive team is headed there now to check for survivors and a news conference is scheduled for 12:30 p.m.

Flagler Sheriff Rick Staly said Friday his agency is leading the search-and-rescue effort and will turn the investigation over to the National Transportation Safety Board after they find a fuselage or something more concrete. He said all they have now are a few pieces they think are from the plane.

"It's going to be a long day, I suspect," Staly said. "Obviously we were hoping that when daylight came, it would be a little quicker and easier. But it's a very difficult terrain to search. It's just going to take a lot of time.

"We're not going to give up until we have located the rest of the aircraft and see if we can help somebody that's in there," he said. "Obviously as time goes on, it's looking dimmer for survivors. But we're not going to give up hope."

The Federal Aviation Administration said it lost contact with a small Piper PA44 Seminole twin-engine aircraft approximately 22 miles north of Ormond Beach at about 11 p.m. Thursday.

Preliminary reports from the FAA indicated two people may have been aboard, but Staly said Friday there may have been three people, although that has not been confirmed. According to Piper's website, the Piper PA-44 is primarily designed for multi-engined flight training.

(CRASH DATA: See how Volusia and Flagler counties compares in plane crashes.)

The plane was traveling to Ormond Beach from Brunswick, Georgia. Search efforts are concentrated on Pellicer Creek Aquatic Preserve, authorities said. Staly said as many as three people may have been aboard.

"We do have a confirmation from a local witness that they saw the aircraft flying low with an engine sputtering," said Chief Mark Strobridge of the Flagler County Sheriff's Office. "What we're trying to do is get out there and look for anyone who may be injured."

Some debris was located in the marsh that may have belonged to the aircraft, Strobridge said. "But we haven't been able to get to it to identify it fully. We have no visible identification numbers."

"We have people in airboats, we have people above in a helicopter," Strobridge said. "We also have the U.S. Coast Guard on the waterways and in the creek area, also searching. So we have land, sea and air covered."

The Volusia County Sheriff's Office sent their Air One helicopter and an air boat to help in the search, sheriff's spokesman Andrew Gant said.

The search is more difficult because the plane may have gone down in a marshy area on a dark night, Strobridge said.

"It's very difficult," Strobridge said. "Whenever you drop something into a marshy area it can be covered over very quickly by waters or by mud or by other things. That makes the search a little difficult, especially at night."

The search is focusing on a four- to five-mile area on both sides of the Matanzas River, near the same area where 77-year-old Raymond A. Miller of Palm Coast died in a plane crash in October 2014. It took several days for search teams to recover the wreckage and identify Miller after that crash.

(READ: Recovery of wrecked plane in Flagler hampered by remoteness)

Strobridge also warned of the potential for dangerous animals in the wildlife preserve area, which may hamper the search.

A Coast Guard crew aboard an MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter from Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater joined the search for survivors at 2:15 a.m. Friday.

“We’ve gotten a lot of cooperation both from our federal partners as well as our state partners in this process,” Strobridge said.

“We have two helicopters up and we have about three or four boats out there on the water,” Strobridge said. “We have more coming.”

Other agencies involved in the search include Flagler County Fire Rescue, St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, St. Johns County Fire Rescue, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, St. Augustine Police Department, the United State Border Patrol and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.